


Predicamental

by woodironbone



Series: Escape from Angelville [1]
Category: Preacher (TV)
Genre: (yet), Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Claustrophobia, Cussing, Drinking, F/M, Fix-It of Sorts, Jesse Custer's Big Bi Awakening, Kissing, M/M, Multi, No Sex, POV Jesse Custer, Polyamory, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Present Tense, Trapped In A Closet, everyone talks it out, except it's not really a closet, they're doing their best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-06-30
Updated: 2018-06-30
Packaged: 2019-05-30 01:35:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,702
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15086162
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/woodironbone/pseuds/woodironbone
Summary: An impromptu escape from Angelville leaves Jesse with some added time to think, and Tulip with an opportunity to take action. Because honestly, someone's gotta do something about these boys and their baggage. Spoilers up through 3x01.





	Predicamental

**Author's Note:**

> This show, as much as I adore it, keeps digging the grave deeper and deeper for all my polyamory hopes and dreams, so I took matters into my own hands. Featuring mild shenanigans and attempts at healthy communication with mixed success (well, mixed w/r/t the healthy part). Thanks so much to [FitzKreiner](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FitzKreiner) and [salvage](https://archiveofourown.org/users/salvage) for enabling, encouraging, and beta reading.
> 
> Content Notes:  
> \--There's a bit of unexamined/unresolved trauma from both Tulip and Cassidy because even when they're trying real hard, none of these kids are great at emotional honesty  
> \--Jesse spends much of the latter half having a panic attack related to claustrophobia and PTSD

 

 

†

 

This was far too easy, in retrospect, and the longer the road stays quiet as Angelville sinks into the dark of night behind the backward horizon, the more certain Jesse becomes that this is going to go bad. Somehow, he can’t see it yet, somehow they’re going to catch up to him. Gran’ma got her talons back in him and she has no designs of letting go, not ever again. Maybe they should’ve just killed her. Killed them all. Of course they should’ve. Stupid not to. It felt simpler this way, at the time. He’s made that mistake before.

He’s made so many, by now.

Jesse doesn’t voice any of this, no sense to it when they’re trying to let themselves breathe; he just casts his gaze from the window to the driver’s seat. He’s seen Tulip alive a hell of a lot more than he’s seen her dead, but there’s still something amazing in it now, maybe just the relief of it. Needing the reminder that she is still here to stand against the horror of how nearly she wasn’t. She’s still wearing the dress she died in, stained with her blood. Illuminated by the glow of the headlights, he can see her eyes are set straight ahead, her hands at ten and two and her mouth in a small, firm line. He wonders what she’s thinking about, and decides not to ask.

“Can we not have the radio?” Cassidy pipes up from the back.

And to think Jesse had almost managed to let himself forget about _that_ whole can of worms.

He lets his eyes flutter closed in brief meditation, willing himself to stay calm. When he opens them again, he keeps them on Tulip, refusing to dignify Cassidy’s intrusion with a glance.

“It’s Tulip’s car,” he says. “She’s the one who decides.”

“Right,” says Cassidy, “and what makes you think I was asking you?” Even without looking at him, Jesse can feel the hardness of his stare before it flicks away, toward Tulip. “Tulip, can we have the radio, please, love?”

“If she doesn’t want it on, she _doesn’t want it on_ ,” Jesse grits out, let’s hear it for meditation.

“And if _Tulip_ tells me to shove it, then I most certainly will. It’s just I’m goin’ a bit stir crazy back here, and no offense, padre, but I don’t think you’ve got much of a career in ASMR, because I’ve been listening to you breathe all night and I’m definitely not having any of the good tingles.”

“The hell is ‘ASMR’?” Jesse twists in his seat, finally fixing their vampiric companion with a look. Cassidy is sprawled, leggy and viscous, across the middle of the backseat with his sunglasses on despite the pitch darkness of the world outside, the goddamn tool. “No, you know what, I don’t care. Just shut up, all right? If Tulip wants silence, let her have—”

The car speakers crackle to abrupt and violent life with an impossibly loud punch of sound, and suddenly the small dark space is filled with the high-velocity scattershot dueling of twin guitars. Jesse recovers his composure, having jolted embarrassingly and to Cassidy’s evident amusement, before turning slowly back to Tulip. There’s an open DragonForce cassette in her lap; a gift from him, years ago.

She glances at him, a quick look he’s not sure how to read, and says, “If Tulip wants silence, she can ask for it her damn self.”

Cassidy snorts, and Jesse shifts his gaze ahead, not so sure how to recover his composure this time.

 

 

They drive hours into the night, Tulip taking them from DragonForce to whatever absurd Louisiana talk radio they can find in these parts back to the same DragonForce tape all over again, before she finally switches it off.

“I need a break,” she announces, and pulls off at the immediate exit. Makes it feel like she timed it.

There’s no arguing with her, so Jesse just shifts in his seat, wondering how it is they’ll come looking, and when, and what they’ll do when they find him. He doubts he’ll get a good sleep tonight.

Tulip drives them into a dead little town with no signs of night life, its dismal streets completely empty, and pulls them down a narrow side street which turns out to be an alleyway. Stashing the car in a dark corner. Not the best hiding place, but they’re short on options.

“Did anybody spot a hotel?” says Cassidy. “Or I suppose we could sleep in the car if—”

“Nobody’s sleeping in the damn car,” says Jesse, too quick and too curt. _Nobody’s sleeping with anyone else in the damn car._

Tulip opens her door and steps outside. “Get out,” she says, equally curt. She’s mad about something, Jesse’s completely lost in the weeds as to what. He does as he’s told, and his eyes track over Cass as he follows them, slipping off his sunglasses and hooking them onto the front of his shirt.

“So where are we going, then,” says Cassidy, meeting Jesse’s eyes with a steely glare.

Tulip doesn’t answer, just pops the trunk and pulls out a crowbar.

“Whoa, now,” says Cassidy, taking a step back just as Jesse takes a half-step forward and says, “Tulip?”

Again, she ignores them, walking over to the dingy little door set into the brick wall of the building they’ve parked alongside. They both watch, equally agape, as she jams the crowbar into the door latch and levers it open without much fuss. She pushes the door wide and turns back to face them.

“Gentlemen,” she says, calm and expectant.

“What the bloody hell did you do that for?” Cassidy says rather shrilly. “Are we doing a heist now?”

“Tulip, what’s goin’ on?” Jesse steps a little closer but doesn’t get within arm’s length just yet. “Are you—”

“Jesse Custer, I swear to that absentee sonofabitch God, if you ask me if I’m okay, I will put you in the trunk and drive you all the way back to Angelville,” she says, punctuating the threat with a shake of the crowbar before gesturing inside with it. “Both of you, stop whining and get in before somebody sees.”

Jesse and Cassidy exchange a look, the first in recent memory not run through with mutual animosity, and then Cassidy, apparently having something to prove, shrugs and heads obediently into fuck knows where. Jesse hadn’t paid attention to the front of the building and he suspects Cass didn’t either. He scowls and follows him into a dark, amorphous space, a back hall of some kind. Tulip steps in beside him and quietly, almost gingerly, shuts the door.

“So what’re we doin’?” says Cassidy. Jesse can just see his weedy outline against the dim light of the room beyond this hall. “Are we robbing the place, or just sort of squatting?”

“I need a drink,” says Tulip as she brushes past, uttered with the finality of an answer.

That’s enough for Jesse to piece together where they are, and he follows her silently, leaving Cassidy to bring up the rear, still babbling away.

“I could do with a bit of something me-self, but is there not some sort of wee-hours liquor store about? Or we could just find an open—oh fuck me, it’s a bar.”

The bar is a modest affair, looking more or less like the one Jesse used to inhabit back in Annville. Dim off-hours lighting reveals old hardwood floors, drab peeling wallpaper that might have been green once, and scattered, half-hearted decorations, the typical paraphernalia of a dwindling town. Beside the bar, a pair of grey swinging doors leads into what is probably a kitchen. The bar itself is the only piece of the room with any allure, a heavy wood countertop shiny with too much varnish, a strip of mirror behind it that looks like it hasn’t been washed in years, a colorful and respectable collection of bottles. A smattering of tables and chairs fills out the space with some unwelcoming booths along the wall and a derelict jukebox in the corner. Business isn’t good enough to keep it open past midnight, it seems. Jesse’s eyes find the clock and he realizes it’s actually just about 3 AM. They were on the road a while, everything seeming to bleed together into some kind of liminal non-time.

Tulip makes an automatic beeline for the alcohol, her heels clicking faintly on the hardwood. She pauses to slip off her shoes, then steps behind the counter and sets about fixing herself a drink, easy as if she worked there. Jesse hangs back by the entryway, some sort of survival instinct telling him to keep his distance, but Cassidy grins and heads up to join her, sliding onto one of the waxy red leather seats.

“Do they have any real whiskey back there?” he asks. “O’Shea if you can find it.”

Tulip doesn’t answer, her eyes flicking once to Cassidy and then back to her drink. She’s using a margarita glass that might as well be a punch bowl. Jesse’s too preoccupied by the overall vibe she’s projecting to notice what, precisely, she’s pouring into it, but it’s at least three liquors, one of them an awful bright swimming-pool-blue. Cassidy’s attention has also migrated to the drink, squinting at it as one might a strange insect.

“Well that looks fun,” he says eventually as Tulip adds a bit of soda and some kind of juice. “Got another one of those in you?”

In quick succession Tulip plunks an orange slice, a bendy straw, and a cocktail umbrella into the drink, then lifts it to sip slowly, staring Cassidy down all the while.

He seems to finally read something off about her, and sits up a little. “Maybe I’ll just help myself,” he says hesitantly.

“Nobody else is gettin’ anything until we sort some shit out,” Tulip barks, startling them both.

Cassidy balks under the sudden hostility, but now, with the other shoe finally dropped, Jesse steps forward, coming up right to the bar so he can better look her in the eye. She sips her neon blue abomination furiously, her cold stare now aimed squarely at him.

“Tulip,” he says gently, “what’s wrong?”

“What’s _wrong_?” She slams her drink down on the counter and some of the liquor sloshes out, the glass staying miraculously intact. “You’re asking _me_ what’s wrong? I wanna know what the hell is going on with you two. You’ve been snapping at each other like dogs ever since I came back. Now I wanna know _why_ , and I’m gonna know why, right now, or you can both sleep on the damn sidewalk out front.”

The silence that follows this reaches down into the marrow of Jesse’s bones. He avoids looking at Cassidy, and he can feel Cassidy avoiding him; both equally invested in avoiding this whole damn conversation, but here they are. Somebody’s got to say something, but Jesse isn’t sure where to start.

“I am _waiting_ ,” says Tulip, drumming her fingers on the countertop. When the silence persists, she clicks her tongue and takes another long sip of her drink and nods toward it. “This ain’t gonna last forever, and by the time it runs dry I better have some answers.”

“It’s like you told us, Tulip,” Cassidy mutters, leaning heavily on the bar before he swivels his seat around to face Jesse. His expression is cold, a poor match with his otherwise relaxed posture, almost oozing off the seat. “It were _his_ friends, them white-suit Grail bastards, that killed you.”

“I’ve already said they weren’t my friends,” Jesse growls, but Cassidy is far from done, sitting up straighter and jabbing his finger toward Jesse as he barrels onward:

“And that’s not just it at all, padre, no. It was you that led the bloody cowboy to us, too, and you that was fuckin’ about when he nearly killed her, and you that didn’t get rid of the damn weapons and told her you did. And when she got shot, you weren’t there, either. When we needed you, you were never there. Again and again and again.”

“I came back,” Jesse says sharply, fingers twitching toward fists, blood boiling under his skin. Everything in the bar feels too hot now, the air too musty and close, thick with tension and humidity.

“Yeah. Because I called you. And what good did you do then, huh?” Cassidy slides off the stool, looming nearer into Jesse’s range, floorboards creaking a little too ominously under his boots. “I could’ve saved her. We didn’t have to go back to your nasty little family at all, did we? But no, that would’ve been the worst thing, worse than letting her die, too horrible to think about, her being like _me_.”

“Wait,” says Tulip, shifting abruptly from attentive to shocked as she turns her big eyes on Cassidy. “What?”

“He tried to turn you into a damn vampire!” Jesse erupts. He’s holding himself back by inches; Cassidy’s within reach, could lay him out with one sucker punch and they’d be off to the races, but that’d only make Tulip madder at this point, and it’d make a mess they definitely don’t need.

“It would’ve saved her life!” Cassidy, meanwhile, doesn’t seem to be holding himself back at all, doesn’t seem to need to. He looks caught somewhere that’s not as angry as Jesse expects; there’s something off in his expression, something like desperation. “I was trying to _help_ her, Jesse, and it would have _worked_ without all the bloody rituals and meetin’ up with your shite family o’ dickheads. A right lovely bunch, them, murderers and all, but it was _me_ you treated like a monster, Jess. Like that’s all you’ve ever seen, is a monster.”

“Do you even care what _she_ would have wanted?” Jesse wrests his attention away from the confusion of Cassidy and seeks out Tulip instead. He finds her standing perfectly still behind the bar, her eyes cast down in a muted expression, equally difficult to parse. “Would you have wanted that, Tulip?”

They’re both looking at her now, Cassidy still with that kind of uneasy desperation, and Tulip just stands there a moment. In the dusty reflection of the bar mirror, Jesse can see a subtle slump in her shoulders. “I don’t know,” she says finally. She looks up them both before settling on Cassidy. “I don’t know, Cass. You told me yourself why it’s… why it’s so bad. Watching all your friends die, over and over again, and I—I don’t know if I would’ve wanted that. If I’d been… I don’t know.”

The presence, the acknowledgment of a conversation that happened between them while Jesse was gone is hard to bear, as much as he knows he doesn’t have much right to complain about it. Cassidy is right about some things. He _wasn’t_ there. He knows that. He knows.

He latches onto this anyway, as if it were his conversation too: “And do you think that’s what _I’d_ have wanted?” Cassidy looks at him, both reluctant and full of reproach. “Growing old while she stayed young? Dying and leaving her behind?”

Cassidy hesitates a long moment before dropping his gaze to the floor, the fight momentarily gone out of him. He leans over, bracing one hand on the bartop, and nods to himself, not so much in agreement as absorption. “Right,” he says. “Yeah, no, I get that. It’s the worst.” He lingers there a moment before looking up again, eyes darting between them. “But what about me, eh? You think I like the idea of, of watching you both die and getting to start the whole thing over again? You think I don’t—” He breaks off, returns to the floor, scraping the tip of his boot slowly, almost methodically, against some old, sticky spill. “Anyway it doesn’t matter. That’s not why I would’ve done it. I just didn’t want her to die.”

“Cass…” Tulip softens noticeably, reaching out and laying her hand over his.

The moment she touches him, Cassidy seems to come out of his malaise. He gives her a faint smile. “Well,” he says, “it all worked out, I guess. Sort of.”

Jesse stares at them, at the point of contact between them, feeling something like bile rising in his throat. Not bile, no; it’s the Word, the cracked, fragmented remains of it, the bone-deep urge to command them both to _**Stop**_. Wouldn’t work, would make them both angrier if he tried, and what’s more there’s something wrong in it, like he’d be lashing out blindly without understanding the target. He’s felt this before. The anger that was also fear that was also something else when Cassidy had known her favorite song, known something he hadn’t, something so critical that it had helped bring her back. The twist in his gut when he’d seen Tulip lying peacefully asleep, Cassidy curled up beside her. Anger and fear and something _else_. What is it? What _is_ it?

Too hard to think about is what. Instead he plants his weight, hands resting easy on his hips, a confident stance belying the ache in his throat, the dryness in his mouth. “Is it true?” he says, his voice at once soft and very, very hard. They both look at him. Cassidy knows immediately what he’s after, and gingerly tugs his hand back, burying both hands in his pockets and slinking off across the room as if to lick his wounds, like he thinks he can hide amidst the tables. Jesse shifts his gaze back to Tulip. “Is it true?”

“Is _what_ true, Jesse?” she says impatiently.

Jesse tilts his head, wondering if she has any idea what’s coming, wondering if Cassidy just made the whole damn thing up to fuck with him. “Is it true you slept with him,” he says quietly, “in the back of your car.”

Tulip’s reaction is a slow-moving punch to the gut, a moment of shock followed by a resigned rolling of her eyes, a disbelieving shake of her head toward Cassidy, who’s watching them both like they might be a rig of explosives about to go off. Immediately set adrift, Jesse reels back as if the floor were shifting beneath him, his shoes coming off the liquor-stained wood with a loud adhesive rip, too loud in the dead silence.

“Christ,” he murmurs.

“Well, shit, no wonder you guys are yappin’ and pissin’ everywhere,” Tulip sighs. “Cass, why’d you have to go and tell him that?”

“Were _you_ ever gonna tell me?” Jesse cuts in before Cassidy can babble his excuses.

“Why, so we could hurry up and have _this_ magical moment?” Tulip throws her hands up and almost goes back to her drink before catching herself, instead placing her hands on the bar and leaning in toward Jesse. “You and I weren’t even a _thing_ then, Jesse. You left me, remember? You remember that? You were off on your bullshit boy scout one-of-the-good-guys preachin’ adventures and you left me _alone_. The fuck was I supposed to do?”

“ _Supposed_ to do?” Jesse drifts toward her as if magnetically pulled, leaning on the bar to mirror her stance, which does not falter. “There some rulebook I don’t know about?”

“I love you, Jesse,” Tulip says, the words sounding ungainly in such a harsh tone. “I will always love you. ‘Til the end of the world. But you hurt me. You left me to twist for a long time. You don’t get to get mad about what I did while you left me alone.”

The clear, succinct indictment pulls Jesse up short. There’s truth in it, and part of him might even be ready to accept it, if not for the immediate available distraction Cassidy presents. He’s been too quiet for this. Jesse pulls back from the bar and turns to find Cassidy mired and brooding, leaning against the edge of a booth and frowning heavily at the floor.

“And what do you have to say for yourself?” Jesse demands.

Cassidy shrugs, a surrendering gesture, and for a moment it seems like he isn’t going to answer. When he does speak, his voice is low, darker than usual. “We almost left you, you know,” he says. “Tulip and I.”

Not expecting this and not yet understanding the timeline on which it all occurred, Jesse can only stare at him, brow furrowed, lips parted in preparation for words he doesn’t have at the ready.

Cassidy meets his eyes and holds his gaze for a moment before rolling his shoulders forward, levering himself off the booth. He takes a few creaking steps closer, staying well out of reach but apparently needing the emphasis. “That’s how far away you pushed us. D’you get that? If Tulip hadn’t been shot, we’d be long bloody gone.”

“The fuck are you talking about?” Jesse looks to Tulip and finds her avoiding his gaze. “Tulip?”

She lifts her chin, levels a stare at him.

With a sharp shift of his weight, driven by fraying nerves and an unbearable impulse to start this fight and finish it, Jesse pivots toward Cassidy, ready to hurl himself at him for the implications of it, for everything. Cassidy even flinches at the ferocity of it, and maybe it’s that, maybe something else, but something stops him. Jesse stays put, staring at Cassidy while he takes care to rebalance. Then he turns back around. Tulip is still watching him, calm as ever, like she knew he didn’t have it in him. Once again Jesse rests his hands on the smooth varnish of the counter and leans in close, studying her stony face. “You’d have left with him?”

She folds her arms.

There’s that quiet again, that low, deadly, marrow-bone quiet, made heavier by the stillness of this worn-down place and the empty night outside. Jesse considers the question that lies ahead of him, drastic, unthinkable, unavoidable. It spills out of him before he can reconsider: “Do you love him?”

The tension snaps like a rubber band as she pulls back and lets out an impatient huff. “Jesus Christ, Jesse.”

“ _Do_ you?”

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Tulip stares at him in wide-eyed disbelief. “Are we really doing this _Days of Our Lives_ bullshit?”

Jesse swallows hard, clamping down on the steady swell of unease over her repeated evasion. “Just answer the damn question, Tulip.”

“Tulip…” Cassidy’s voice, meek as it is, has Jesse throwing him a harsh look over his shoulder. Cassidy’s shrunk back now, his posture curled over, seeming unusually small across the room. He looks miserably at Tulip. “Listen, I know you don’t, okay? You don’t have to—”

“Here’s a question for _you_ , Jesse,” Tulip interrupts, dragging his attention back. “Why are you keepin’ him around? Why do you like havin’ him with us?”

Too many times in this conversation, Jesse’s felt like a rug’s been pulled out from under him. He hesitates, certain this is a trap, not sure how. “Wh…”

“Is it because he’s funny?” She steps back suddenly, abandoning her drink and walking out from behind the bar, coming around to face Jesse, advancing slowly with every word. “Is it because he’s _useful_? Good for a laugh, good in a fight?” She stops inches from him, staring up into his eyes with something like defiance. “Is that the only reason?”

“Guys, I don’t think I really want to be here for this,” Cassidy mumbles.

“That’d be a pretty shit way to think of a friend, right?” says Tulip, sparing only a brief glance for Cassidy, back on Jesse before he can squirm out from under her. “Right?”

“What the hell point are you trying to make?” Jesse says, his voice coming out strained.

“Yeah, I’d like to know that also,” says Cassidy.

“What about you, Cass?” Tulip turns on him, pinning him under her stare. Even across the room, he freezes in place. “Have you come through hell and high water with us, all this way, just because of _me_? We both stuck by Jesse when he was being a goddamn shithead, right? I did it because I love him. Why’d _you_ do it?”

Cassidy opens his mouth and shuts it again, his eyes darting nervously between them.

“Last I heard he hates me,” Jesse mutters.

“Aye, and I meant it, too,” Cassidy mutters back.

“ _Yeah_ , he hates you right now, after you treated him like shit,” says Tulip derisively. “I’ve been known to hate you, Jesse Custer.” She backs off, returning to her drink to take a few fortifying sips; then she turns back to face them, one hand resting on the bar, the other on her hip, looking for all the world like a disappointed school teacher.

“Tulip, what do you want from us?” Jesse says, feeling tired and without recourse.

“I just—” She cuts herself off with a heavy sigh, taking a moment to put her words in order. It’s a sudden change, the drop from fired up to careful. Jesse’s seen her like this before. Always when she has something big to say, something that makes her frustrated and nervous all at once. Anger and fear, and something else. “I want us to be able to work something out.”

“Work _what_ out?”

“ _Us_ ,” she says, her confidence in saying it mostly bravado now. She hesitates and tries again, that bravado dissipating with each syllable: “The three of us. Together.” She grabs her drink blindly and knocks some of it back, now completely abandoning the straw.

This time the silence could only be described as ‘tenuous.’ Jesse stares at her, Cassidy hovering uneasily in his peripheral vision, neither of them willing to speak first, both knowing one of them has to. Last time it was Cass, Jesse figures he may as fuckin’ well.

“ _What_?” he blurts.

“Yeah, I second that,” says Cassidy. “What?”

“I swear, you two are the most useless sons of bitches who ever brought a gal back to life,” Tulip mutters, running the tip of her finger around the rim of her glass. “Answer the damn question, Cassidy. Why’d you stick around, and I _know_ it wasn’t just for me. I know it wasn’t.”

The way she’s looking at them now, the way Cassidy is wavering and avoiding Jesse’s querulous gaze, it opens up a veritable chasm of confusion beneath Jesse’s feet. He watches Cassidy shift and stall, his fingers twitching in a clear desire for a cigarette before he shoves them back in his pockets.

“You’re right, it wasn’t,” he says finally. He raises his eyes to Jesse, lingers only briefly before averting them again.

Jesse takes the opportunity of Cassidy’s downturned gaze to take him in for a moment, his slouched shoulders, hands tucked away to keep from fidgeting. Clothes that don’t fit, never fit. Always looking entirely out of place and like he might very well belong, all at the same time.

“But it doesn’t fuckin’ matter, does it?” says Cassidy dismissively. “Jesse’s not like that.”

“Like what?” Jesse looks between them, baffled, itchy with some unspecific apprehension.

Tulip ignores him, content to let him twist, instead narrowing her eyes at Cassidy. “How do _you_ know that?” she demands.

Cassidy sighs wearily, looking like this is all somehow far too familiar. “Tulip, love, that’s not the kind of thing you just _don’t_ know about.”

“And how long have you known Jesse, Cass?”

“Uh…”

“Well, I’ve known him my whole life.” She’s smiling at Jesse now, a smile full of knowing and vindication, and Jesse wishes he knew why.

“Like _what_?” he asks again.

“You know,” Cassidy says. He waggles his hand in a terribly vague gesture that is apparently meant to mean something. He keeps gesturing, each time more emphatically, his eyebrows raised.

“ _Bi, Jesse_ ,” says Tulip in a burst of impatience. On receiving only another nonplussed and rapidly blinking stare from him, she rolls her eyes and says, “Bisexual?”

Jesse is acutely aware of the sensation of realization as it washes over him, his eyes widening subtly, his lips parting again with no words behind them. He takes a faltering step back, the floorboards feeling uneven and treacherous.

“There’s your answer, I think,” sighs Cassidy. “Might I have that drink now?”

Tulip ignores Cassidy, her eyes tracking Jesse’s, close and inescapable. He stares at her, his head full of static. This should feel like an ambush, another rug swept from under him and a kick while he’s down. Instead it’s something else. She knows, of course she knows, things about Jesse that he can barely grab hold of. She’s known him long enough and she’s been smarter all the while. Jesse is paralyzed, his thoughts refusing to calcify, like there’s some barrier he’s never before noticed.

“You know what I mean,” Tulip says, soft and sweet, “don’t you?”

Does he?

“So let me get this straight,” says Cassidy, thoroughly breaking his concentration. “You think I should shag Jesse—”

“No one is shagging anybody!” Jesse blurts out like a scandalized goddamn house wife.

“—and that’s just gonna fix this whole thing right up, is it?”

“It’d be a _start_ ,” says Tulip. “Ain’t it worth a shot?”

“Now just _hold on_ a second,” Jesse protests, clawing for purchase in a conversation that’s gotten well beyond him, if he can just get them to stop for a minute and give him time to breathe, space to sort this out, if he can just—

“If it’s all the same to you, Tulip, I’m a bit tired of wanting things I can’t have,” says Cassidy. “What I want right now is whiskey. Can I have _that_?”

Again, Tulip ignores the patient request, still holding Jesse captive, this time without a smile. She purses her lips in a little moue of deep concentration, and he feels like retreating, afraid she’s about to devastate him with more searing arguments he can’t keep up with. But in the end she relents, breaking eye contact and tilting her head down as if in defeat. “Cassidy?”

“Mm?”

“They got a kitchen back there,” she says. “They gotta do bar food, right? Gonna have a walk-in freezer, something like that?”

Cassidy doesn’t seem to understand why he’s the one being asked, and when Jesse chances a look at him he finds him squinting like he’s trying to suss out a trap. “Probably,” he says eventually.

“Go and get me some french fries,” she says.

Cassidy hesitates, then sighs audibly, making his way past them and through the swinging doors.

It’s obvious, Jesse is certain, how relieved he is to be alone with her again. Like a weight’s been lifted, allowing him to breathe easy. He steps in close to her, eager to set things right. “Tulip,” he begins.

“Wait.” She puts her hand on his chest. “I just remembered. Don’t like fries anymore. I want a burger.”

Jesse blinks at her. “Don’t like _fries_? Since when?”

“Since…” She trails off, looking away, her mind suddenly, visibly absent. She shakes her head quickly. “It’s stupid. They just started to remind me of… Look, it doesn’t matter. I want a burger instead.”

When he doesn’t move, she jerks her head toward the kitchen. “Well c’mon, go and tell him!”

There’s likely no sense arguing. The whole thing is stupid, and feels, again, like some kind of trap, but Jesse’s been thrown enough off balance by now that he lacks the wherewithal to do anything but step away, leaving her with a vaguely reproachful frown, and follow Cassidy into the kitchen. Compared to the bar, the kitchen is blinding, all white linoleum floors and metal countertops lit by harsh fluorescents. Cassidy has located the walk-in freezer on the far end of the room and is wrestling with the door, cursing an unintelligibly Irish blue streak at it before he finally pops it open. Jesse comes up beside him, and Cassidy finally notices him with a little start.

“What do you want?” he mutters as he heads into the icy cold space. Jesse peers in after him. It’s dim inside, lit only by a few flickering bulbs, and it’s only about the size of a generous closet. There are metal shelves lining each of the walls, stacked with boxes of cocktail garnishes, meat patties, some crates of liquor, other related ephemera. Jesse steps in reluctantly, squeezing past Cassidy to get to the burger fixings.

“Did you not think I could handle this little errand myself, then?” says Cassidy, taking a bag of pre-cut fries down from the top shelf.

“Tulip doesn’t like fries anymore,” says Jesse. “She wants a burger.”

“Actually, I changed my mind. I’ll take both.” They both turn to find Tulip standing in the open doorway, arms folded. Must've snuck up silent on her bare feet. She brought the crowbar, Jesse notices without fully registering. She nods to Cassidy, or rather to the bag of fries, and holds out her free hand. “Gimme those.”

Cassidy hands the fries over hesitantly and turns around to get to the burger patties.

Seeing no sense in questioning Tulip at this point, Jesse tosses her a bun and Cassidy offers a burger wrapped in wax paper, and they both stand there awkwardly, waiting for her to step out of their exit.

Taking her sweet time, Tulip leans in and looks around, her eyes finally settling on something at the bottom shelf. “Is that vodka?” she asks.

Like dogs on command, they both turn to look, and no sooner have they done so then the door shuts firmly behind them, and there’s the click of the lock turning followed by a heavy clunk of metal-on-metal which Jesse quickly realizes is the sound of Tulip sliding the crowbar through the latch.

“Tulip!” he shouts as Cassidy just sighs, “Oh, bloody hell.”

Jesse throws himself against the door, beating against it with both hands. “Tulip, let us out of here!”

“It’s not going to work, Tulip, it’s too bloody cold in here,” Cassidy calls with one hand cupped around his mouth, relaxed and utterly unhelpful.

Through the door, her voice comes muffled: “You boys are stayin’ put until you work this shit out!”

“Tulip, you open this door right now,” Jesse says sharply.

Unmoved, she answers, “I’m goin’ to make some dinner, I’ll come check on you in a bit.”

“ _Tulip_!” Jesse bellows, but he already knows she’s walking away.

“Well, that’s just great.” Cassidy slides a box full of uncut potatoes off of the bottom shelf with his foot and plunks himself down on it. He leans over to examine the crate of liquor and says, “It _was_ vodka, if you’re into that.” He lifts a bottle out, unscrews the cap, and takes a quick swig. He comes away with a wince and a groan. “Really shite vodka. Warm up your insides same as the good stuff, though. Here, have a taste.” He holds out the bottle.

“Shut up,” Jesse snaps, coming away from the freezing metal of the door and pacing in a tight circuit with what little space he has. “This, this is all your fault.”

“Oh, my fault is it. How the fuck do you figure that, then.”

“Y-you goin’ off about how it wasn’t just her, and I’m not like _that_ , and all that—horseshit.” Jesse delivers a swift kick to a crate of what might be gin, he doesn’t care what. The bottles rattle loudly and Cassidy sits back a bit. Jesse leans down, jabbing a finger near his face. “You encouraged this behavior.”

He knows he’s already making perilously little sense, that he’s got about T-minus thirty seconds before he really sinks into the oblivion of obscurity here. Tulip doesn’t know, couldn’t have known the dark place this would thrust him down into, dark and tight and at the bottom of the river. She’d never have done this if she had. At least it’s cold, colder than that coffin ever was, a bit of remove in the form of an added torment. Cassidy’s presence offers little to no comfort. Nobody’s seen him like this, never. No one ever should.

Cassidy raises one hand to lazily brush Jesse’s aside. “I could just as easily blame you for not just goin’ along with it, and it would make about as much sense,” he says. “Believe me, padre, I’d love to blame you. But _your girlfriend_ locked us in here. It’s Tulip’s fault.” Seeming to find the matter settled, he leans back against the hard edges of the metal shelves, stretching out his long, skinny legs to put his feet up on another box of something. Sprawled out like this, he can almost cover the whole room, end to end. He settles in like a goddamn Roman emperor, now taking far more liberal sips of his vodka.

“Don’t just fucking _sit there_ ,” Jesse growls. “Help me open this door!” He heaves his shoulder against it, feeling the rattle of the crowbar, but it doesn’t budge.

“You heard her yourself, she’ll be back in a minute. Can you not just wait it out, you mad wanker?”

Jesse turns on him with a hard pivot. “Get up and help me, Cass, or I’ll—”

“Or what?” Cassidy looks up at him, uncowed, smiling an infuriating smile. “You’ll make me? Could’ve done, once.”

Jesse is practically vibrating now, and he’s not sure if it’s the cold or the frustration or the panic or all three. “Cassidy,” he says, taking care to speak quietly, “ _please_.”

Cassidy hesitates, the smile slipping from his face as he squints again, that look of struggling to understand what’s happening. In the end, he sighs noisily and picks himself up.

“Fine,” he says, “because you asked nice, for once. But let me tell you, this door was hard enough to get open when it wasn’t locked and bloody barricaded. And you know I’m already pretty strong.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Jesse returns his energy to shoving his weight against the door, and Cassidy comes up beside him. Together they manage to rattle the crowbar even more, but otherwise there are no signs of improvement, and after an extended period of straining and grunting Jesse finally caves, half-collapsing against the door. His hands hurt from the cold of it.

“Like I said,” sighs Cassidy, and returns to his lounging setup. “Just wait it out. She won’t let us freeze. Probably.”

The freezing is the least of Jesse’s concerns, but it’s just as impossible to ignore as the rest of it. He rubs his hands together and blows on his fingertips as he returns to pacing up and down the comically small allotted space. The floor is smooth cement here, and his footsteps feel abrasively loud, but he can’t stop moving like a rat in a cage.

“Christ’s sakes, what’s the matter with you?” Cassidy looks him up and down, the bottle halfway to his mouth.

“I’m _agitated_ ,” says Jesse.

“Yeah, I can see that.” Cassidy peers up at him, and Jesse quickly realizes the attention is actually much worse than being ignored. “Are you _sweating_ , padre?”

Is he? Jesse stops pacing, passes his fingertips across his brow. They come away damp.

“Only gonna make you colder, you know,” says Cassidy idly.

“What the hell does she expect us to do in here?” Jesse looks back at the door, half-hoping Tulip can hear him. She’s probably frying up her meal, maybe humming to herself. She couldn’t have known. If she’d known—

Cassidy snorts. “Talk it out. Maybe a snog. That better be all, because I’ve had a shag once in a freezer, bigger’n this, meat storage, like, and let me tell you, it was awful. Never again. Sure, your nipples are hard but your balls are bloody hibernating for the entire experience, may as well not exist.”

“Shut the fuck _up_.” Jesse turns on him again, tensed as if expecting a fight. He’s shaking visibly now. Cold, or frustration, or panic. All three.

Cassidy’s watching him, calm as can be, the bottle nestled in his lap. He sits up slowly, no longer lounging but perched, looking at him with too much intent. “Jess,” he says softly. He raises a hand and makes a vague gesture encompassing the whole of him. “Who did this to you?”

“What?” Jesse wants to back away but there’s nowhere to go, so he just stands there, breathing short and heavy.

“Well, I’m not an expert, but I think generally people don’t just decide to get afraid of little enclosed spaces like this one.” Cassidy sets the bottle on the floor, rubbing his hands together absently. “So what happened, then? What made you like this? Somebody shut you up in a cupboard, eh? Get stuck in a crawlspace?”

There’s levity in these suggestions, but not enough to make light of it altogether. Jesse hadn’t expected this—maybe it was stupid not to, but he hadn’t expected Cassidy to pick up on it at all, at least not so quick. He certainly hadn’t expected any scrap of kindness. He hovers for a moment, uncertain, thoughts racing too fast to sort them out, too cold to calm down. He turns away. “None of your goddamn business.”

There’s a hesitation but he doesn’t look back. “Right,” says Cassidy eventually. “Fair enough.” Jesse shuts his eyes, hearing the glug of the vodka as Cassidy tips it back, the clink of glass on cement as he sets it down. Feels like a whole minute passes, then Cassidy says, “You know, you hurt me, too, Jess.”

“What?” Startled into turning around, Jesse finds him still sitting there, elbows resting on his knees with his fingers laced together, his expression strange and dead serious.

“Tulip, she said you’d hurt her and you couldn’t be mad at her for—” He waves a hand, trying ineffectually to dismiss the subject. “But it’s not just her. It was me, too.”

Jesse scoffs, the kindest noise he can muster under the circumstances. “What’d I ever do to you?”

Cassidy lowers his brows, his expression darkening. “You think I don’t give a shit about anything that happens, don’t you?” he says. “But I _do_. You acted like I was nothing to you, Jesse. You were supposed to be me best mate!”

“Yeah?” says Jesse with a burst of rage he can’t seem to temper. “Well last I checked ‘best mates’ don’t go around sleeping with each other’s—”

Cassidy’s on his feet so quick it startles Jesse back against the shelves. “I’m not bloody talkin’ about that, you stupid eejit!” he snaps, spit flying from the furious articulation. “New Orleans, Jesse. You left us _both_ alone, we _both_ needed you and you were gone! And I asked you to use your stupid bloody superpower to help Denis and you wouldn’t. Said it’d be selfish. But what did _you_ use it for? Sending an innocent boy to hell and makin’ a man sing a song and, and trying to save Tulip? How’s that any different from saving my son, you bleedin’ hypocrite?”

Jesse’s mouth hangs ajar at the unexpected onslaught. Cassidy’s face is as open a book as ever, and there again is the anger Jesse expects and knows how to read; but there’s still that something else too, something Jesse doesn’t get so readily or so well. If he had to put a word to it now he’d call it anguish, and that feels wrong, ill-suited.

“D’you know what I had to do, because you wouldn’t help me?” It’s Cassidy who’s trembling now, Jesse realizes, maybe the cold, and maybe something he’d been too preoccupied to see before now. “You don’t, because you never asked, you were never gonna ask.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Jesse says in open bewilderment. “I know what you—that you turned him into a—”

“Yeah, and I didn’t want to!” Cassidy explodes, and again Jesse backs into the cold metal shelves. “I didn’t want him to live like I do. I don’t want _anyone_ to live like I do. But it was that or lose him forever, knowing he hated me, because I’d been too busy fuckin’ about to be a good dad. You wouldn’t help me and that was the only choice I had, Jesse. For all the fuckin’ good it did him.”

Jesse shifts his weight uneasily, trying to regain some ground in the face of all this, well, it seems anguish was the word after all. Cassidy rubs roughly at his face with the too-short sleeve of his jacket, wiping away tears, Jesse realizes.

“Cassidy…” Jesse swallows, his throat dry. “What—”

“It doesn’t matter now.” Cassidy laughs without an ounce of humor. “Maybe I should’ve taken a page out of your book and just let him die. Probably would have been easier. If I’d have known…” He shakes his head. There’s something more here, but now that they’re on the cusp of it, whatever it is, Cassidy seems like he’d rather abandon it. Just like Tulip and her french fries. Cassidy looks at the floor, his voice now reduced to a sullen murmur. “But I didn’t want that. I loved him and I would’ve done anything for him. Like I would’ve done for Tulip.”

Jesse stiffens, but he doesn’t have the requisite energy to get mad, not now. The cold is making him sluggish, the constant burn of adrenaline making him sloppy. He wraps his arms around himself, jamming his hands into his armpits. “I… I know you were just… you were trying to help her,” he grits out. “I didn’t want her to have that kind of help.”

“Yeah, you made that abundantly clear. And it still makes me feel like shit.” With that, as if all the anger’s been drained back out of him, Cassidy sits back down, his head in his hands.

Jesse looks down at him for a while, dimly aware of the press of walls all around him, imagining the world outside to be muffled running water. He keeps talking to block it out: “Well I—I’m sorry.”

It feels inadequate. Maybe it is. Cassidy looks up at him like he’s trying to decide that himself. In the end he seems to feel it’s not worth the energy to go on being angry, because he shrugs and says, “All right.”

The lull between them is horrible and stretches on far too long. Jesse can hear things beating against the walls. Fish. Maybe alligators. He doesn’t know what to say next. He doesn’t know what to say.

Cassidy throws him a line without even looking up to realize he needs it. “I’m sorry too, padre,” he murmurs.

Coming out of all that, this catches Jesse more off guard than anything. “For what?”

“I didn’t know she was…” Cassidy rubs the heel of his hand against one of his eyes. “Tulip. When we… I didn’t know she was your… I didn’t even know you knew each other at all back then. Wouldn’t have done it if I had.”

This almost seems unimportant in the face of the slow-burning ache of anxiety currently suffusing Jesse’s entire body. He fights to cling to it, something he’d needed desperately to hear just moments ago.

“Is that true?” he says.

Cassidy moves his hand around to rub at his brow. “Mmh,” he says, which seems like an affirmation. “Trust me, I felt really bloody guilty. I wanted to tell you sooner. She just… she knew you’d be angry. And then I got angry, and I… well, you know.” He looks up, blinking at Jesse in the dim light. “I never wanted to hurt you, Jesse. I just… I want you both to be happy, I don’t want to get in the way of that.” He looks away quickly, like he’s embarrassed. He fidgets, fingertips tracing over his knuckles. There might be more he has to say, but it’s not forthcoming.

Jesse nods to himself, just a little twitch of the head amidst all the shivering. “Well…” he says, “all right.”

Cassidy gives him a faint smile before looking back down at his heavily inked hands. He has nothing to add, which means that’s that, no more conversation, nothing left to talk about, and Jesse’s left standing there hugging himself, tighter and tighter. Seconds stretch into minutes which dilate like they could be hours, days. Cassidy studies his cuticles. The walls are closer than ever and the cold feels distant now, no longer a barrier to protect Jesse from that beast, that animal panic that coils in his chest. Silence swells up until it’s overwhelming, pressing down on Jesse like the weight of water, and he feels like he’s disappearing, sinking down deep into the depth of memory because there’s nothing else, nothing to save him from the thick wet air and the sweltering darkness and the drowned noises outside and the smell of his own piss and shit as he—

“Jesse. Jesse!”

He looks up and finds Cassidy standing again, when did that happen, his hands braced on Jesse’s shoulders, cold pressure he can feel through his shirt. The panic must have gone outside him, maybe he was breathing too fast, swaying, something Cassidy could hear and see. He tears his eyes from Cassidy’s, looking around the room without really taking any of it in. He’s not there. He’s not there. He’s here, right now, in a goddamn freezer in a bar somewhere, far away from the river. Cassidy’s grip on him feels solid, encouraging.

“I think you should sit down, mate,” says Cassidy slowly. “C’mon.” He nudges Jesse around and guides him to sit on the potato box. Jesse lets himself be led. Once he’s seated, Cassidy crouches down beside him, one hand still on his shoulder.

“The hell’s goin’ on with you, mate?” he says. “Does Tulip know you’re—”

“No.” Jesse shakes his head. His breath still isn’t coming in right. Hard to focus. “No, nobody knows. She wouldn’t have done this if she had.”

“Right, I thought not.” Cassidy’s concerned, Jesse realizes at a distance, watching him with some kind of fragile earnestness that Jesse’s not certain how to take. He looks away, down at his quivering hands.

“Gran’ma,” he says softly, and his voice stutters to a halt, and he has to start again. “Sh-she—when I disappointed her, she used to put me in this… coffin.” He tugs at his collar, the white band around his throat suddenly feeling far too tight. “They’d close it up, airtight, with a tube in so I could breathe, and they’d lower it down to the bottom of the river and leave me there.”

He can feel Cassidy looking at him and he can feel the subtle shift in tension, easy enough to guess at what he’s thinking, the horror, the revulsion, the goddamn pity—

“Jesus Christ,” he says. “What a crazy old bitch.”

Jesse looks at him, a little stunned by the reaction, though it’s undeniably better than anything he could have expected. There’s no pity in Cassidy’s face, only flat disapproval. “Yeah,” says Jesse after a moment, managing the threadiest whisper of a laugh. “Yeah, she is.”

“Perhaps we should’ve knocked her over and ran.” Cassidy leans in with an air of conspiracy. “Thrown her in the river. I’d have liked to see how she would’ve handled _that_.”

Jesse looks down to hide a smirk, but that mood can’t last very long. He remembers too well what she said to him— _See what happens_. “She’s dangerous,” he murmurs. “Make no mistake. And she will come looking.”

“Yeah, well. She wants to get at you again, she’ll just have to go through Tulip and me.” Cassidy slaps him heavily on the shoulder and Jesse finds his eyes, finds him smiling companionably for the first time in what feels like ages. Jesse holds tight to that unexpected lifeline, and too late he realizes there’s a swell of emotion building in him, something that threatens to overwhelm him all over again. He looks away quickly.

“What is it?” Cassidy asks.

Jesse presses his hands to his mouth, still trying feebly to warm them. “I really fucked this up, Cass,” he whispers. “All of it. With both of you.”

“Aye, you very nearly did.” Cassidy slides down into a seated position on the floor beside him, slouched against the shelves. “But apparently it’s nothing being locked in a freezer can’t fix.”

Jesse lets out a hoarse kind of laugh, which evaporates in a full-body shudder.

“Hey, c’mon now. Have a drink. Warm you up a bit. I’m sure she’ll be on her way back any minute now.” Cassidy offers him the bottle. When Jesse tries to take it, his fingers recoil from the frosted glass, and Cassidy pulls it back. “All right, okay now. Here we go.” He gets on his knees instead, holding it up to Jesse’s mouth.

Jesse gives him a dubious look, but he goes along with it, letting Cassidy tip the bottle gently between his lips, giving him a hefty gulp of unfiltered bottom-shelf vodka. Jesse comes away coughing, and Cassidy laughs and slaps his back again.

“There we are. Absolute shite, but it does the job.” Cassidy knocks back some more for himself, then offers Jesse another sip, which Jesse takes against his better judgment. A few times back and forth like this, and Jesse finds he actually is starting to feel a little warmer, and the gentle haze of alcohol has started to guard him against bad memories. He relaxes his shoulders by degrees.

“Can I ask you somethin’?” he says quietly, gazing at the door, imagining Tulip beyond it. “How’d you know that was her favorite song?”

Cassidy blows air through his teeth and takes another drink. “Dunno,” he says. “Heard her listening to it once, saw how it made her… you know, come over all different. Soft and quiet, like.”

Jesse shifts uneasily, avoiding for now the question of what it is, exactly, that’s making him uneasy. “But how’d you know that and I never did?”

“Ah, don’t take it so hard, padre,” says Cassidy. “It’s like… when you fall in love with somebody, and—I’m sorry to put it like that, but that’s how I feel—you really notice everything about them, right? I bet you were like that. But you’ve been in love with her for a while. You start filling in blanks on your own. You miss things easier. So I saw something you didn’t.” He shrugs, takes another swig, and offers the bottle again. “At least that’d be my guess.”

Jesse takes him up on the offer, taking a bit of a longer drink this time. He supposes the object is to get buzzed enough that taste is no longer a concern, because it tastes like how Tulip’s nail polish remover smells. But it _is_ doing the job. He sits there quiet for a moment, silently processing all this, then nods. “I guess I can see that.”

“She loves you,” Cassidy says softly. “Don’t worry about that. I, er… Well, like I said, I don’t intend to get in the way.” He frowns to himself, like he doesn’t realize he’s being watched. When he catches Jesse looking, he flashes a brief smile and offers the bottle again. “Here, you want anymore?”

Again, Jesse accepts the drink, though his attention remains fixed on Cass. “Why’re you bein’ so nice to me,” he mutters.

Cassidy pulls the bottle back and sets it on the floor. “I dunno,” he says. “Can’t go on hating you, not right now, anyway. And she was right, about all of it.” He leans his head over to look Jesse up and down. “Well, maybe not about you.”

Jesse resists the kneejerk urge to evade this, instead studying him for a moment. It had been easy to bury the confusion Tulip had dragged up in him, especially amid the fullness of his panic. Now, with Cassidy right there half-smiling at him, it’s harder to flee.

“I don’t know,” says Jesse after a too-long pause. “How are you supposed to know something like that?”

Cassidy tilts his head, considering. “Usually just comes to you,” he says. “One day you wake up, see a bloke and think ‘Right, I’d like to have a taste o’ that,’ just like you do with any girl. S’how it was for me, anyway. Granted I’d been kicking around about forty-three years before I realized.”

“Really?” Jesse looks at him again. “That long?”

“I really like women.” Cassidy shrugs and takes another swig of vodka. “Was content with it, for a while. Longer you wait, the more you want to try new things, I guess.”

“So what you’re saying is, on a long enough timeline…” says Jesse, eyebrows raised.

“Don’t know, padre. Plenty out there who’d never give it a try, vampire or not. Certainly never would’ve guessed about you.” He’s facing forward now, but he gives Jesse a slow sidelong glance. “If there’s anything to guess about.”

Jesse’s instincts are deeply seeded and clear: look away, you look _away_ when a man looks at you like that, when he’s that close, when the conversation goes this deep. He’s tempted to return his attention to his freezing cold hands, maybe even to the door, remind Tulip they’re still in here, since she seems to need the reminder. Like so few of his temptations, he resists it.

Cassidy seems to notice the strangeness of this, how long this eye contact is being held, and he sits up a little straighter. “Hold on there, boyo,” he says with a strangely smug little grin. “What’s happening here? Was she really right about you?”

The moment broken, Jesse’s eyes dart away. “I don’t know,” he says, halfway to defensive. “I… I like having you around, Cassidy. I never got any further than that. I don’t know how I’m supposed to know.”

“Hm.” Cassidy fidgets with the bottle, drawing lines in the frost with the tip of his finger. “Sometimes you just gotta say ‘fuck it’ and try something,” he says.

Jesse allows himself, slowly, to look back. He’s still on the potato box while Cassidy’s pooled languidly on the floor, leaving them at a height difference inverted from usual. Cassidy senses him looking and cranes his neck to gaze up at him, his lips a little blue, but smiling.

“Maybe we should huddle for warmth, perhaps,” Cassidy suggests. “Probably should’ve done a lot sooner. S’what they do in all the films.”

Jesse doesn’t move from his spot, still staring down—vaguely enjoying the novelty of _down—_ at Cass.

“Getting so I can’t feel me toes.” Cassidy can see well enough that his attempts at casual banter are going unanswered, and he tilts his head, thick brows knitting together. “Padre?”

Jesse says, “Fuck it.”

It’s sloppy, awkward, unplanned. Jesse bends down so fast that Cassidy jolts a little in surprise, causing Jesse to miss the mark completely, his lips brushing against the three-day-growth of stubble at the edge of Cassidy’s mouth. Cassidy’s still holding the open bottle, and he fumbles with it while Jesse tries to course-correct. When Cassidy finally manages to set the bottle down, it tips over, spilling its remains across the floor and his trousers.

“Shite,” he mutters against Jesse’s mouth, but that seems to be the extent of any distress. He slides both hands, shockingly cold, up around Jesse’s jaw to the back of his neck and meets him directly, properly this time, a simple, straightforward sort of kiss. His lips are freezing but his breath is so, so hot, and against the bitter cold air he smells faintly of cigarettes and drying sweat, which should be awful but it’s not. Jesse doesn’t pull away, but beneath the impulsive thrill of it, he feels miles out of his depth.

When it stops, Cassidy doesn’t let him go, just hovers there holding him, eyes darting about rapidly. He looks thunderstruck for a moment, then that fades into another grin.

“So, how’d that work out for you,” he says.

Jesse feels a surge of too many things at once—fear, confusion, disarray, an urge to pull back from this and bury it again. This is all coming at him so fast, hardly any time from the inception of the idea to its execution, and if he weren’t freezing his ass off, backed into a corner on a box of potatoes, this might very well go somewhere different, a thought that scares him in its plausibility.

As it is, Cassidy’s hands are starting to warm his skin just a bit, and Jesse doesn’t pull away, he doesn’t know how to answer the question posed but he does know how to act, so he clamps his hands around Cassidy’s skinny little arms and pulls him in and kisses him again, harder this time, the better to drown out the rest. Cassidy makes a muffled noise against him and squirms closer, his fingers now tangling up in Jesse’s hair, his lips parting and his tongue tracing fast across Jesse’s teeth. He knows, surprisingly—actually Jesse supposes it’s not surprising at all— _exactly_ what he’s doing, and it’s suddenly all Jesse can do to keep up. He leans into it until he’s hauled himself off the box and down, rather painfully, onto his knees, more or less straddling Cassidy’s lap. Cassidy breaks apart from him then, though he doesn’t pull free of the grip on his arms, just lets his hands drift down into the folds of Jesse’s shirt.

“Did you forget what I said about shagging in a freezer?” he says. “Bloody awful, mate, I’m telling you.”

“Be a lot fuckin’ warmer than this,” Jesse grumbles in lieu of revealing just how flustered he is. He’s caught between options—ignore the bubbling panic and kiss him again, or back the fuck up and breathe a minute—when a third option is unceremoniously chosen for him as a sudden scrape of metal signifies the crowbar being slipped out from the latch. Both of them are caught staring at the door, neither quite willing—perhaps too cold—to detangle themselves as the lock clicks out of place. There’s a breathless moment where nothing happens, then the door begins shifting minutely in place, its seal stuck fast. From the other side, good deal of muffled grunting ensues.

“Oh, for—get off.” Cassidy extricates himself with some effort and gets up, shaking himself for either warmth or composure or both as he proceeds to the door. “Tulip, you’ll want to stand back,” he calls, waiting for a moment until the struggling stops, and there’s a silence that somehow seems begrudging.

Cassidy glances back at Jesse and flashes a stupid grin before throwing his entire stringy body into the door, which flies open hard enough that it bangs off the adjacent wall. Tulip jumps back, dropping the crowbar with a shrill clatter, as Cassidy hurtles through and skids on the linoleum.

“Ohh, shite,” he wheezes, flopping onto his back. “All right. I think you pretty well loosened it up for me there.”

“For fuck’s sake,” says Tulip, picking up the crowbar and looking in at Jesse, who’s still exactly where Cass left him. “You okay in there?”

“Oh right, is Jesse okay. _I’m_ fine, thanks,” says Cassidy, groaning loudly as he picks himself up.

Jesse manages a nod. He must look shell-shocked, because Tulip doesn’t seem to believe him. She steps in and offers him a hand up. Her hand is hot against his.

“Don’t ever do that again,” Jesse manages to get out as he climbs to his feet.

Tulip stands on her toes to give him a kiss on the cheek, a little gesture of contrition. Her lips are impossibly warm. “You smell like rubbing alcohol. Have a good time?” She eyes the spilled vodka. “Maybe too good.”

Now that he’s upright again, Jesse is all too eager to leave the little prison. He shuffles out, leaving Tulip to follow him.

“You all right?” Jesse says to Cassidy, who’s rubbing at his head shoulder with a wince. Cassidy nods and waves him off.

“Well, that was almost _civil_ ,” Tulip remarks as she shuts and locks the freezer door again.

“Shoulda seen him a minute ago,” says Cassidy with a big shit-eating grin. “There was _nothing_ civil about that.”

In the harsh light of the kitchen fluorescents and the sudden comparative heat, Jesse feels overexposed, uncertain and disoriented, like waking up from a dream. Tulip is looking at him with mingled surprise and delight, and he flounders and stammers like he’s been caught doing something wrong. Fear’s boiling back up, threatening to strangle him and drown out everything good that might just have happened.

“I _knew_ it,” Tulip says, and grabs onto his arm, halting the rise of panic in its tracks. She grins at Cassidy. “Aw man, we shoulda made a bet.”

“Lucky me we didn’t,” says Cassidy, though his focus is on Jesse. “Hey, all right, padre? Still with us?” He leans in and sets a hand at Jesse’s shoulder as if to steady him. “Been kind of a weird day for you, eh?”

Between the two points of contact, Tulip on his arm and Cassidy at his shoulder, Jesse starts to feel a sense of stability creep back over him. It’s small and tentative—he’s still not entirely sure how they got here—but it’s something. A lot’s been crammed into a short space (and him into a small one) but he’s come out the other end of it with something he didn’t have before, and that’s probably a good thing. And they’re both smiling. They’re _smiling_.

“Kind of,” he says shakily.

“Well I’m gonna need to hear all about the part I missed,” says Tulip, and starts walking them both back out of the kitchen. “You boys want some french fries?”

“To _start_ with. You bloody owe us after that.”

“Yeah…” says Tulip in a tone that _seems_ guilty, but fully isn’t. “I know.”

She twines her fingers through Jesse’s, clinging to him now like being apart was just too much to bear. He’s not sure how to tell her what it put him through, just that he’ll have to sooner or later, and now’s not the time. They step back out into the main room, which now feels staggeringly hot. Tulip has left a large plate of french fries and a half-eaten burger on the bar.

“You didn’t even eat it all,” Cassidy accuses.

“Oh sorry, maybe I should’ve let you guys freeze a little longer.” She smirks and reaches out, snagging Cassidy’s wrist in her free hand, drawing him to look at her. He smiles anew, different from the easy smile of before; now it’s a soft, shy expression Jesse’s never seen on him before. It catches deep in the pit of his gut, a feeling he could’ve easily mistaken for jealousy just an hour ago. Now it’s tangled up, complicated, but carding through it he finds longing, he finds affection, and most of all he finds awe, pure, absolute amazement that there’s someone else in the world who knows exactly the right way to look at Tulip.

“So,” she says, looking between them, “where are we at?”

Jesse doesn’t hesitate, can’t afford to, not when certainty is so fleeting. He reaches out, seizes Cassidy by the front of his shirt, and yanks him forward, dragging him down to meet him for another kiss. Cassidy stumbles and blurts out a startled noise against him and has to brace himself on Jesse’s chest, but he falls into it easily enough, and he’s warmer now, and outside the frozen air he tastes even more strongly like smoke and sweat and that cheap, horrible vodka. Jesse breaks away just as it’s getting interesting, keeping his hand fisted in Cassidy’s shirt as he turns to Tulip (who’s been watching with eyes wide and lips parted in a satisfied half-smile), draws his arm around her waist and leans in to kiss her, too. This is easier, natural and less intense, unencumbered by the sensation that he has something to prove. They’ve been doing this since they knew how. It’s like breathing.

Her lips curl against his as she smiles wider, and when he pulls back she’s looking at him with all the tight-leashed ferocity of their earliest days together. Like any second now she’ll shove him straight back onto these horrible wood floors and climb on top and ruin him.

Instead she grabs Jesse’s hand where his fingers are still wrapped tight in Cassidy’s shirt, laces her fingers through to take hold as well, drags Cassidy all the way down to her and completes the circle. Jesse’s startled by it, got so lost in the familiar moment with her that he almost forgot the whole object here. This isn’t the first time he’s watched them kiss. In the gun club it had been performative, but not entirely; it had left a sharp sensation under his sternum, a flicker of insecurity and all that muddled confusion through which he never sought to sift before now. Now, Cassidy is every bit as tender as he was then, hands settling tentative at her hips, sinking into it like he belongs there, like he’s always belonged there. Tulip, one hand curled around Jesse’s and the other around the back of Cassidy’s neck, is on the borders of rough with him, hungry and alive.

She pulls back just as abruptly as she started it, her hold loosening a bit to let Cassidy straighten up, half-gasping as he does. She beams at him and pats his chest. Jesse lets his hand fall slowly, still disoriented but with an electric current running through him, the static in his head now just blood pounding from the exhilaration. He’d almost forgotten where they were, what they’re running from. It seems distant now, no less dangerous, but no longer insurmountable. Naïve to think so. Hasn’t been that naïve since things started with Tulip. His eyes drift to Cassidy. Strange to be back here again, fearful and comforting all at once.

“Can-” Cassidy’s voice shivers out and he swallows thickly. “Can I have that whiskey, now, love?”

Tulip steps away from them, her blood spattered skirt swishing as she practically swaggers back to the bar. “To start with,” she says.

**Author's Note:**

> For the curious, [this](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHJapDojlaE) is the DragonForce song Tulip puts on in the car. Speaking as someone who knows next to nothing about metal, I found it to be quite enjoyable.
> 
> She probably didn't eat too many of those french fries.


End file.
